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New Tendencies was united by the desire to abolish the artist as creative genius and replace him or her with the notion of the visual researcher. This was rooted in a deep democratic idealism, which also motivated working with new and often cheap industrial materials and using the most anonymous visual elements to create dynamic and visual structures that appear to vibrate in space.

“Introduction”. In New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978), by Armin Medosh. p. 7

Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro’s People is a photograph of a large group of people that was digitized and its resolution brought down so that the people are only just still recognizable. The idea behind this work was programmatic. Although Cordeiro had been an important advocate of Concrete Art in postwar Brazil, by the late 1960s he began ti dismiss all variations of Constructivism as “paleocybernetic.” In his subsequent work with computers, Cordeiro tried to provide examples for a socially engaged art in societies he believed would be increasingly transformed by computers and telecommunications. Cordeiro’s participation in tendencies 5 was of particular importance, because his name was on one of the very first artist lists suggested by Mavignier for the first New Tendencies exhibition. Cordeiro’s own development ran parallel to that of New Tendencies. Starting out from a Concrete Art position, he challenged the dominance of the supposedly neutral, infrastructural level in 1965 by demanding that the infrastructural art of New Tendencies move to a “semantic” element. After starting to work with computers in 1969, he was interested in the democratization of art. Cordeiro tried to combine the original interests of New Tendencies into infrastructures of seeing and perception with the new possibilities of computers and telecommunications networks. In a text written in 1971 titled Arteônica, Cordeiro formulated his personal manifesto of electronic art. According to Cordeiro, the art of the first phase of New Tendencies had created something like a “machine language” for urban and industrial society, but in the 1960s those tendencies had suffered a crisis due to the emergence of a new popular mass culture based on electronic media. The development of new means of telecommunications could provide the macroinfrastructural basis for a new democratic art that also addressed the imbalances of countries like Brazil, divided between megacities such as São Paulo and underpopulated, remote areas. If brought to a conclusion, Cordeiro’s ideas would have shown a way out of New Tendencies’ rationalist and abstract dead-end street toward a new art for the multitude, of which his work People (1972) seems the perfect illustration.

“Dematerializations: Art in the Early Information Revolution (1971/1973-1978)”. In New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978), by Armin Medosch. p. 203.

Algorithms are transforming the world around us. They come in many shapes and forms, and soon they will permeate all spheres of technology, ranging from the technical infrastructure of financial markets to wearable and embedded technologies. One often overlooked point, however, is that algorithms are also shaping the biosphere – the thin complex layer of life on our planet on which human survival and development depend. Algorithms underpin the global technological infrastructure that extracts and develops natural resources such as minerals, food, fossil fuels and living marine resources. They facilitate global trade flows with commodities and they form the basis of environmental monitoring technologies. Last but not least, algorithms embedded in devices and services affect our behavior – what we buy and consume and how we travel, with indirect but potentially strong effects on the biosphere. As a result, algorithms deserve more scrutiny.

It is therefore high time that we explore and critically discuss the ways by which the algorithmic revolution – driven by applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, logistics, remote sensing, and risk modelling – is transforming the biosphere, and in the long term, the Earth’s capacity to support human survival and development.

It’s not a matter of dredging up a more appropriate poster child for the starving-artist cause. If we want to improve the lot of artists, we need to shift gears from a woe-is-the artist conversation to one about the importance of art and the need to support the creation of art at the societal level.

This new conversation will depend in part on developing new ways of thinking about the struggles of artists, and broadening the focus of cultural production away from individual practitioners. There are a couple recent works in particular that help us conceptualize these problems.

HS: It means that you decide, OK, there is this subset of documents and I’m going to partner up with a specific organization and let’s work on that topic. And that becomes a kind of aesthetic decision.

LP: No, that’s just a strategy of publication. It wasn’t about aesthetics.

HS: I disagree. It really is a formal decision, about how to format information, about its form. And that’s important on the level of safety, of course, but also in terms of protecting your autonomy and the autonomy of the work. It is about aesthetic autonomy, too. To go back to our first meeting, it was so interesting because we began a series of conversations about Turkish jet strikes in Turkey facilitated by American drone reconnaissance, and then two years later you published the corresponding NSA documents about those strikes with Der Spiegel, which showed exactly the station that relayed the information to the Turkish air force to send jets to perform the airstrikes. It’s like you and Snowden suddenly provided something I thought would be hidden forever: the perspective, the aerial perspective.

By re-imagining communication and building anew on existing social links, by exposing the network topologies and the way infrastructures work, and by repurposing and reusing existing technology, one could say that the initiatives taken by these artists belong to what Armin Medosch refers to as the “Network Commons.” [29] As offline networks, toolkits and platforms, these playful structures and speculative scenarios of connectivity might all be considered part of a growing commons based on a “combination of social and urban topologies,” “constructed, possessed, managed and distributed by all.” [30, 31] But then what is the role of art in this? The answer possibly lies in the new relationships these projects formulate between people and technologies, and in the ways that these relationships are brought to processes of social change. Either one takes Fuller’s approach, which adopts Goriunova’s “organizational aesthetics” to study the work of Mongrel and Mediashed, or Jaromil’s approach, who sees artists’ tools as “social sculptures” that can enrich experience in one’s local environment. [32, 33] In any case, it becomes clear that artists are undertaking an active role of organization and change involving potentialities, skills and affects